Last March, Apple sued HTC over patent infringement in Android phones.

Now HTC has counter-sued Apple, this time using 9 patents it acquired from Google on September 1, including some patents Google recently acquired from Motorola.

Google makes the Android phone operating system, but it is not a party to these lawsuits.  It recently purchased Motorola, apparently so that it could acquire a large mobile-phone patent portfolio to better protect itself from patent infringement lawsuits that plague the industry.

However I did not expect the Motorola patents to be used so quickly, nor did I expect Google to sell or give those patents to its partners.  I wonder under what terms those patents were sold.